MMM2012 Conference Prize Winner

David Edmunds (Cohort 1) wins Best Poster Prize at MMM2012 Conference

Sinbad the Sailor, Zheng He, Magellan and Elcano, Francis Xavier, James Cook, De Bougainville,… all of them famously sailed past the island of Pulau Ujong and the strait of Malacca, off the southernmost tip of the Malay peninsula. David Edmunds, a student of our first cohort, matched their feat on the 14th October when he arrived at Singapore. However, his objective was less exploratory and dangerous than theirs: he was there to present a poster of his research at the MRS Multiscale Materials Modelling conference, that took place between the 15th and 19th October in the Biopolis area of the city.

David has been working on a new approach to the coarse graining of classical molecular dynamics, examining coarse-grain approaches based on the functional integral representation of the dynamics of a system rather than focusing on the equilibrium properties through the partition function. He has been lately trying to apply his approach to a system consisting of a large number of buckminsterfullerene molecules, and presented some of his results in the poster at the conference.

The poster immediately drew the attention of some of the organisers of the conference–he was thoroughly interrogated by Prof Bill Curtin for instance. And, on Friday the 19th, right after the last plenary talk of the conference on the modelling of lobster shells (a topic confusingly appropriate for a conference taking place on island renowned for its seafood and general gastronomic craze), Prof David Srolovitz, chair of the conference, announced that David Edmunds had been awarded the Prize for the Best Poster in the conference. Apart from a diploma and a handshake with Prof Srolovitz, the award included S$250 and the satisfaction of knowing that the poster had beaten the 100 others that were presented in the conference. Let us congratulate David for a well–deserved award!

David is supervised by Prof Matthew Foulkes, Prof Dimitri Vvedensky and Dr Paul Tangney.